The news of Maya Angelou’s passing arrived just as I was bracing myself to write something about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ big cover story inAtlantic arguing that the U.S.A. should pay reparations to American blacks. [The Case for Reparations, May 21, 2014] Well … that’s not actually what Coates is arguing. Of the 57 occurrences of the... Read More

Every Tuesday the print edition of theNew York Times includes a Science section. I don’t bother with it much, in spite of having been a science geek since infancy. Like most aspects of our metropolitan culture, the NYT Science section has been colonized by the hipster lifestyle. Girly concerns dominate, and there is very little... Read More

Victor Davis Hanson’s Tuesday column “Facing Facts About Race,” published at the National Review Online website, continues to draw commentary. I passed some brief remarks myself here at VDARE.com the day it appeared. Since most of the subsequent commentary points out the undeniable parallels between Prof. Hanson’s NRO column and one that I published on... Read More

I flew into Nashville last Friday night to give a talk to the annual conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens. I assumed someone from would be there to meet me, but no-one showed up. I didn’t know which hotel the conference was being held at. The Council of Conservative Citizens had not named the... Read More

There is much talk about “the talk.” “Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her... Read More

You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on... Read More

George W. Bush’s seven-day, five-country trip around Africa generated much surprised comment about how popular our president is over there. The leaders of the nations Bush visited beamed with pride through their photo-ops. In Tanzania, local artists had emblazoned the president’s smiling face on fabric, which was made into dresses and smocks worn by citizens... Read More

One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist in the USA, I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types standing around in groups and gossiping. Because I was new to the scene, many of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me, so I could not take much... Read More

About John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.